Whaily

How to Audit Your Brand’s Current AI Presence

Not sure if or how your brand shows up in ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, or other AI-driven results? The first step to improving your AI visibility is a thorough audit. By auditing your AI presence, you can see what these AI tools know (or don’t know) about your brand. The good news: you can do a basic audit yourself with some guided steps. For more scale and depth, tools like Whaily can automate much of this process. Let’s walk through a step-by-step approach to evaluate your brand’s current standing in the world of AI-generated answers.

Why Conduct an AI Presence Audit?

An AI presence audit will answer critical questions:

  • Are AI assistants mentioning your brand when users ask about your category or products?
  • Is the information they provide about your brand accurate and up-to-date?
  • What sources are AIs drawing from when they talk about you or your industry?
  • How do you stack up against competitors in AI recommendations?

Knowing the answers helps you pinpoint weaknesses. For example, you might discover ChatGPT has no idea your product exists – a sign you need more content and buzz. Or you might find it mentions you, but with outdated info (maybe an old tagline or a discontinued product). These insights are gold for guiding your content and SEO strategy.

Step-by-Step AI Presence Audit

Follow these steps to systematically audit your brand’s presence on AI platforms:

1. List Relevant Queries: Start by listing the questions or prompts a potential customer might use when searching for something in your domain. Include:

  • Brand queries: “What is [Your Brand]?”, “[Your Brand] reviews”, “Is [Your Brand] any good?”
  • Category queries: “best [product type] providers”, “[product type] alternatives”, “top [industry] companies”, generic how-to or solution queries related to your offering.
  • Competitor comparisons: “[Your Brand] vs [Competitor]”, if applicable.
  • Problem queries: e.g. if you sell project management software, queries like “how to manage a project timeline” or “tools to track team tasks”.

This list ensures you check both direct and indirect mentions.

2. Check ChatGPT Responses: Using ChatGPT (use the latest model available to you), pose each query from your list. Record:

  • Whether your brand is mentioned in the answer. If yes, note what it says about you.
  • If not mentioned for a category query, which competitors or sites are mentioned instead.
  • Any factual statements about your brand (for brand queries or comparisons). Are they correct?

Tip: If you have access, try both the default ChatGPT (with knowledge cutoff) and an updated variant like Bing Chat (which uses GPT-4 with web access). The default shows what the base knowledge is; Bing Chat shows how you fare in live web context.

3. Check Google’s AI (Gemini) Results: If you have access to Google’s search with generative AI (SGE or Bard’s latest version), perform the same queries:

  • For each query, does the AI-generated summary mention your brand or quote your content?
  • Are there links to your site in the AI overview? If yes, that’s a good sign – your SEO is yielding inclusion. If no, see which sources are cited.
  • Note if the AI summary provides an answer that your brand could have been part of but wasn’t. (For example, the summary lists three product names in your category and yours is missing.)

You can use the standalone Bard interface as well to see if Bard (Gemini) knows your brand in a conversational setting. Ask Bard some of the same questions and compare.

4. Check Other AI Platforms: Depending on your industry, you might also audit:

  • Bing Chat: Even though it’s powered by similar tech as ChatGPT, its integration with Bing search might produce different results (often with citations). See if Bing Chat cites your website or mentions your brand.
  • Perplexity.ai or other QA engines: These often provide sourced answers. Search for your brand or category and see if you appear.
  • Voice assistants (optional): Devices like Alexa or Siri sometimes draw on wiki or Bing info. Try asking “Who is [Your Brand]?” to see if they have a built-in answer.

5. Analyze the Sources: For any instance where an AI mentions your brand or provides info:

  • Ask yourself, where is this info likely coming from? For example, if ChatGPT says “YourBrand was founded in 2018 and specializes in X”, perhaps it got that from your Wikipedia or Crunchbase entry. If an AI cites a website (as Gemini often does), click those sources. Are they your site, a third-party, a news article?
  • This is important: you want to know who/what is informing the AI about your brand. Those sources should be accurate. If the top cited source is an old blog post or a forum thread, consider updating any outdated info or providing a better, more authoritative source on that topic.

6. Document Findings: Create a simple spreadsheet or document with sections for each platform (ChatGPT, Google/Gemini, etc.) and list the queries, whether you were mentioned, and notes on accuracy or issues. Also list instances of competitor mentions or other brands that appear where you don’t.

7. Identify Gaps and Issues: From your findings, highlight:

  • Queries where you expected to see your brand but didn’t. (These are opportunities; perhaps content to create or optimize.)
  • Any misinformation about your brand that came up. (This needs correction through content or influencing the source of that info.)
  • Competitors who appear more often or rank higher in AI answers. (These are the ones to study – what are they doing content-wise or SEO-wise that you aren’t?)

Using Tools to Streamline the Audit

Manually querying is a great start, but it can be time-consuming. Tools like Whaily can automate much of this auditing process:

  • Whaily’s AI Visibility Report: You can input your brand and some keywords, and Whaily will regularly check various AI platforms to see if and how you’re mentioned. It can simulate user questions and compile an overview of your presence.
  • Comparison and Trend Data: Whaily can show over time if your mentions are increasing or if you got bumped out by someone else. This helps in tracking progress after you make improvements.
  • Identifying Source Citations: Whaily might also highlight which external sources are most influencing AI answers about your brand (for example, it may tell you that Wikipedia and a specific industry site are often cited when your brand is discussed).

Using such a tool is like having a constant audit running in the background. For an initial one-time audit, you can definitely do it manually, but integrating a tool ensures you catch changes (for instance, if next month a new competitor starts being recommended by ChatGPT over you, you’d want to know quickly).

Taking Action Post-Audit

An audit is only as good as the action it prompts. Once you have the audit results:

  • Fix inaccuracies: If AI is stating wrong info (and you identified the likely source, e.g., an outdated Wikipedia entry or an old article), go update those sources if possible. Correct data in Wikipedia or on your own site so that future AI model updates get the right facts.
  • Fill content gaps: For queries where you didn’t show up at all, consider creating content that directly addresses those queries. It might be a blog post titled “Top 5 X in [Your Industry]” where naturally your product is featured, or a detailed guide on the problem that query addresses. This content can improve your chances both in SEO (for Gemini) and by being part of the training data or reference pool for ChatGPT.
  • Boost authority where needed: If competitors overshadow you in AI answers, look at their content and backlink profile. You may need to up your game in getting reviews, press, or thought leadership content.
  • Monitor going forward: Make AI presence audit a periodic task (e.g., quarterly). The AI landscape and models can change quickly – you want to catch any new issues or improvements. Whaily can be set to continuous monitoring, which helps maintain vigilance without constant manual effort.

Conclusion

Auditing your brand’s AI presence is a crucial early step in adapting to the new search landscape. It grounds you in reality – perhaps you assumed your SEO success meant you’re golden, but an AI audit could reveal your brand is invisible in ChatGPT’s world. The insights from an audit inform your next moves, whether it’s correcting information or creating new content. With a clear picture of where you stand across ChatGPT, Gemini, and other AI platforms, you can strategize effectively to boost your presence. In the next parts of this series, we’ll delve into measuring improvement through key AI visibility metrics and how to create content tailored for AI consumption (LLMO), building on what you find in your audit.